This is a blog centering on Dr. Petrosino's course at The University of Texas at Austin entitled " EDC 365E Project Based Instruction in STEM Education." This is the capstone course in the UTeach Natural Sciences professional development sequence. It also serves as a forum for Dr. Petrosino's thoughts and ideas on Project Based Instruction and educational reform.

Wednesday, September 28, 2011

Class 7: 09/15/11-Backwards Design/ Wiggens & McTighe

Today, class began with a discussion of chapters 1 & 10
of Understanding Design by Wiggins & McTighe. Students were
concerned that the Backwards Design framework would be hard to implement in
public schools, in which teachers had to cover specific materials and had
specific teaching roles. Teachers would have to choose activities on certain
bases, such that he/she would have to think of what they wanted students to
accomplish before making a decision on an activity, and teachers would have to
identify with the way students solved problems.

According to the authors, the idea of Backward Design laid
out a framework, not a specific project or a 1-day activity, and it was focused
on a larger scale. Students discussed the “6 facets of understanding,” which
included Empathy, an emotional word, not formally associated with teaching. The
TA asked how empathy applied to teaching math and science and how we would
interpret empathy. Students suggested that we would have to make an emotional
investment in the students; others said that there was a buy-in, that students
would see the value in a lesson and have an emotional response, like feel
motivation. Empathy in science would help create connections between the
material covered and the students, or that students would make the connections
themselves. In the discussion of the 6 facets of understanding, the TA brought
up the updated Bloom’s Taxonomy, and how it was useful in classrooms for
teachers, especially when creating tests for students and to self-evaluate.

The authors of the reading specifically pointed out that
Backward Design was not a prescriptive program, philosophy of educations, or
intended for indirect lesson planning, and the TA went on to discuss how it
included very general steps. In connection to our reading in the previous week
(Barron, Krajcik), all authors brought up the importance of content-specific
goals, motivating questions, and so forth, and the fact that many or most
teachers do not do this in their classrooms.

The discussion then turned to textbooks and the TEKS.
Textbook writers (experts) create books in a way that may match or don’t match
up to the TEKS, and follow a very different or strange way of ordering
subjects. Students asked, how are
teachers supposed to organize their curricula in a way that makes sense for
them and the students, and do we have to make a list of or prioritize TEKS? Activities
and chapter orders have to be decided on by the teachers so that it makes
logical sense for students as they go through the curriculum.

Teachers make the decisions to emphasize one thing over
another (based on personal preferences). Teachers must make an emphasis on the
large concepts that span their subjects, so that, when students are learning,
they don’t get the impression that everything they are learning has the same
weight in the real world. Furthermore, we have to respect the standards (TEKS)
set for us so that students do come away with some understanding of specific
content, and it really does give us a framework of what the students will be
learning. Of course, creating priorities for students varies with the teacher,
but overall, large concepts that students retain are similar from classroom to
classroom.

The “Twin Sins of Design” were also discussed: coverage and
“Hands-on without Minds on”. Hands-on
without minds on is the idea of an activity in which the teacher is hopeful
that, through the activity, the students will somehow learn something. The TA
asked how many students had gone through courses like these, and most of the
class raised their hands (chemistry & physics labs at the university level included).
The idea of coverage was also discussed and relates back to prioritizing the
TEKS and spending different amounts of time on specific parts of the curriculum
designed by the teacher. TEKS should be rated and ranked based on several
factors, taking into account that some show up more frequently on the TAKS and
also based on students’ prior knowledge.

Finally, class ended with a wrap-up discussion of the 3
steps of creating a backward design and a template worksheet was passed out (from
the reading). The template, unsurprisingly, uses many of the same factors
included on the 5E lesson plan model used by UTeach, including “Students will
be able to”, and the Explore, Evaluate, Elaborate, Explain, and implicitly,
Engage.

The template will be used for our field lesson and we will
be expected to note down questions that we plan on asking the students to help
focus the lesson.

Each
day in PBI a different student takes responsibility for blogging about what
goes on in class. Today’s blog is
brought to you by Sarah. ­­­

About Me

Dr. Petrosino is a graduate of Columbia University's Teachers College (MA, 1990) and received his PhD from Vanderbilt University (1998). He completed a post-doc at the University of Wisconsin where he was a member of the National Center for Improving Student Learning and Achievement in Mathematics and Science (NCISLA). In 1999 he accepted a Professorship at the University of Texas and received tenure in 2004. He holds the Elizabeth G. Gibb Endowed Fellowship in Mathematics Education. Dr. Petrosino has published over 20 peer reviewed journal articles, made over 100 national and international conference presentations and has supervised a dozen doctoral dissertations. He has received over 30 million dollars in grants from the National Science Foundation, the Department of Education and the McDonnel Foundation for Cognitive Studies. He is a founding professor of the nationally recognized UTeach Natural Sciences preservice teacher education program. From July 2007 to August 2009 he served as the Assistant to the Superintendent in the Hoboken School District.